SIMON AND SCHUSTER / AUTHOR PHOTO BY KOUROSH KESHIRI
It’s easy to get the impression that all Naomi Klein really wanted On Fire to be is its 53-page introduction, which reads like an update to her fairly optimistic 2014 book about climate change, This Changes Everything. Since you can’t sell a 53-page book (something I think discourages reading, frankly), the rest of On Fire is a collection of climate crisis-adjacent essays Klein wrote for various publications of record, beginning with “A Hole in the World” for The Guardian in 2010—about the impact of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig, which exploded in the Gulf of Mexico—to “The Battle Lines Have Been Drawn” for The Intercept as recently as 2019.
